by Martha Wells
“The pilot,” Gavin said. “Has to be. She ended up here somehow, and it must have been too much for her. The things we felt she must have felt, that damn presence, force, whatever. She didn’t have anyone to bolster her and give her strength. She was on her own, so she just quit.”
Amelia nodded, looked down into the pit.
“What is that?”
There was very little light now, just a split of gold through a crack here and there, so Gavin put a flare in his gun, fired it downwards. It glowed bright, and then it hit something below and sputtered with a reddish glare. The pit was full of blackened meat and rotting guts and all manner of offal.
Slowly Amelia’s face paled.
“What?” Gavin said, staring at her face in the rising glow of the flare.
“I’ve got it figured, Gavin, and it’s worse than we thought. This isn’t a building. This place isn’t a city. Above, those aren’t hoses. They’re veins, or arteries. Down below, that’s afterbirth. We’re inside a corpse, a drying one. Like a huge mollusk. Don’t you see, Gavin? Down below, that’s a womb. The star-shaped things. They were born here. Look around. There aren’t any corridors. Those are artery paths that we’ve walked through, chambers for organs. Not humanlike organs, but organ housings just the same. And this is the birth canal, and down below, the womb. The bones we saw outside, they’re from this thing’s digestive system, crapped out and onto the ground where they were dried by time and cold wind. Bones of humans and all manner of creatures that have ended up here. Those star-heads, they link up and grow, become solid at some point, don’t separate anymore, and then they give birth and die, leaving these shells.”
“You’re sensing this?” Gavin asked.
“No. I’m speculating this, or you’d feel the same thing. Perhaps they’re hermaphrodite. Once birth is completed, the host for the children dies. The replacements feed on what they can find. Maybe even their mother, or whatever this thing can be called. And then they feed on whatever comes through the dream hole. These aren’t buildings in a city. These are the remains of dead creatures, and they have given birth and left their remains, and the cycle continues.”
Gavin looked about. “Maybe,” he said.
“I can’t be absolutely sure I’m right, but close enough, I think. What I am certain of, is I don’t think being here is a good idea. We are too close to whatever that primal power is, the thing we sense, the thing that pulls us in from our dreams, it’s nearby. And that can’t be good. We have to find food, drinkable water. And most important, I can’t stand this stink anymore.”
They went back the way they had come, following the axe scratches, seeking the exit, fearing the arrival of the star-heads.
The cold was almost welcome.
They moved along the bone walk, toward the mountains, choosing a central range that looked dark with dirt and green with foliage, but no sooner had they started out, then the central mountain range trembled. The stretch of the horizon trembled. The green mist that floated above the mountains was sucked back toward the peaks, as if inhaled, and then the mist was blown back out in a great whirling wad, as if by a sleeping drunk.
And then they understood.
There were no cities, and there were no mountains. Only giant, irregular-shaped shells of creatures. Old ones that had given birth. Some larger than others.
Some as big as mountain ranges that still lived and were most likely stuffed tight with new life being baked inside a womb, and in this case, a womb much larger than any of those that had made up the false city. For before them was a beast. Not a mountain, but an impossible slug. The flesh had yet to harden. It trembled like jello and it was vast.
The mountain trembled again, and then moved. Ever so slowly, but it moved. It was easy to outrun, of course. It inched its way along. It would take days for it to reach where they now ran. But they soon came up against the coal-black sea, stood on the shore with nowhere to go. Waves crashed in against the ice, flowing up to the toes of their boots. Gavin began to cry.
“It’s all insane,” he said. “That pilot was right after all.”
Amelia touched his shoulder.
There was a banging to their left. It made them both jump. It was their old friend, Lifeboat Number Three. It had drifted away and back again, sailing crewless along the stretch of icy shore.
“Fate doesn’t hate us after all,” Amelia said.
Gavin laughed. He turned and looked back toward the mountain. It was difficult to tell it had moved. It seemed in the same place, but he knew it had. Tentacles, the size and length of four-lane highways, lifted off of the beast and snapped at the sky. They had appeared like rows of rock and dirt, but now they were revealed for what they were. The ice screeched with the monster’s glacial progress.
Amelia ran to the boat, slipped on the ice, struggled to her feet and grabbed at it. The back end of it swung around, banging against the hard ice. Another few minutes and they would never have known it was there. It would have washed out to sea again.
Amelia held the boat and looked at Gavin.
“The oars are still in it.”
Gavin hurried to join her. He smiled at her. She smiled back. And then the smile dropped off her face.
Coming much closer than the mountain were the star-heads that they had outdistanced. They were as one again, larger than before, but smaller by far than the mountainous monster. They moved much faster than their creator, slurping over the ice, tentacles flaring, mouths open, showing multitudinous teeth, licking at the air with a plethora of what might have been tongues.
“This can’t be real,” Gavin said. “It’s a mad house. One mad thing and then another. I have to wake up.”
“I’d rather not stay here and find out if it’s a dream, Gavin. Come on. We have to go. Now.”
They pushed the boat into the water and climbed aboard, pushed at the ice with the oars, shoved out into the dark and raging waters. They began to row savagely.
The star-head thing moved to the edge of the water and broke apart and its many bodies spilled into the waves.
Amelia and Gavin rowed wildly. The star-heads swam fast, cruising through the water, tentacles tucked. On they came, and soon Amelia and Gavin knew there was no chance of outdistancing them. Amelia pulled her pistol and waited. The star-heads loomed out of the sea, tentacles flashing, attempting to clutch. Amelia fired, time after time, wounded some, possibly killing others. The waters were slick with blood. Gavin swung the axe until it hung up in one of the creatures and was pulled from his grasp, taken away from him and carried into the sea.
For a moment the attack subsided. The pistol was empty. The spare loads she had found in the plane had been used. The axe was gone. There was only the flare gun. Gavin pulled it from his coat and laid it in the bottom of the boat. They clutched their oars as weapons, and waited. They were sitting at different ends of the boat, and they positioned themselves on their knees, ready to fight.
The star-heads came again, came in swarms of speeding bodies and whip-snapping tentacles. Amelia and Gavin swung the oars, slamming down on star-heads as they peeked up over the rim of the boat. Tentacles slapped about like limbs whipped by a violent storm. Amelia felt them brush her, burning her with their sucker mouths, but they failed to manage a solid grip. She frantically wiggled free and swung the oar, knocking them aside.
“Oh god,” she heard Gavin say. She glanced back. One of the star-heads had risen up beside the boat and whip-snapped its tentacles around Gavin and his oar, causing it to lie against his chest; the paddle part of the oar pointed up as if in swordlike salute. The star-head dropped completely back into the water, its tentacles stretched out, and lifted Gavin up like a mother holding a young child on display.
Gavin stared down at Amelia as he was hoisted out of the boat and dangled above the water. Amelia leaned out and swung the oar, struck the tentacles with it, but they were too strong, their grip too tight. They continued to cling to Gavin.
Gavin’s face was as bland and wh
ite as the ice. He ceased to struggle, dangled in the monster’s grip. The tentacles coiled him close and pulled him away, took him down under with little more than a delicate splash.
Amelia began to scream at the beasts, as if bad language might frighten them. She continued to struggle, whipping the oar through the air, contacting other star-heads. They came in a horde now. Tentacles flicked everywhere, popped at her legs, snapped against her arms. The black water turned greasy with blood. Star-heads were grabbing at the boat from all sides, shaking it with their tentacles, trying to tear it apart or pull it down under. Gavin’s head, minus his body, surfaced, rolled, and then was taken by a star-head’s wide open mouth. As the thing started to jerk Gavin’s head below, fins broke the surface of the water.
Sharks. A mass of them.
A great white leaped out of the waves, rolled its black eyes up inside its head as it snapped at the star-head’s tentacles, pulled it and the remains of Gavin down with it. Sharks began to jump from the waves as easy as flying fish. They grabbed the star-heads in their toothy mouths, crunched them like dry toast, then pulled the remains of their squirming meals into the deeps.
More sharks came and went, like a pack of wolves, cutting through the blood-slick waters, snapping at the star-heads quickly, darting away and under, only to rise and circle back and strike again.
And then the battle ceased. The sharks had won. Both sharks and star-heads were gone. One to eat, one to be eaten.
The night rolled in and a ragged moon floated up out of the sea, found a place to hang against the sky. The waters churned and the boat jumped. Exhausted, Amelia lay down in the boat and was eased into sleep by exhaustion. The dark things moved inside her head.
When Amelia awoke the next morning it was still dark, but light was bleeding in with squirts of red, and in short time the sun trembled up and turned bright gold. She thought of Gavin, almost expecting to see him when she had the strength to rise from the bottom of the boat, but his fate was soon sharp in her memory. All she could think about was how he had been taken away by different monsters of the sea. Yet, the sharks had been her saviors. She picked up the flare gun. Gavin had never loaded it. It was useless. She dropped it in the boat.
After a long time, the sun warmed the boat and the sea, and she found a dead shark floating on its back in the water, the bottom half of its tail eaten off in what had probably been a continued and cannibalistic shark frenzy from the night before. She paddled up beside it and saw that its belly was ripped open, and strings of innards hung out of it. A meal abandoned for whatever reason. She reached down and pulled the creature’s insides loose, tugged them into the boat, snapping them off, tossing them on the floor of the craft like enormous tomato-sauced noodles. The guts were filled with offal. She shook that out as best she could, washed it clean with the waters of the sea, then ate it raw. It tasted good at first, but then when she was past her savage hunger, it made her stomach churn. Still, she scooped more out of the shark and tossed it in the bottom of the boat for later.
She had no idea what to do. Perhaps the only choice was to try and see if she could find a place farther down on the slate of ice where the mountainous monster and the star-heads didn’t dwell. If such a place existed.
It was surprisingly warm, considering the ice. From way out she could see the mountainous creature. It took up all her eyeline when she looked to the shore. It had moved ever closer, changing the landscape in an amazing way, slipping along on a monstrous trail of slime that oozed out from under it and greased its way toward the sea.
It was massive. She would have to sail for days to get around it, if that was even possible.
Amelia ate some more of the shark, but the guts had gone bad in the sunlight. She vomited over the side.
Amelia counted four days at sea, and then she lost count. She had been lucky. A fairly large fish had leaped into the boat, and she had bashed its head with an oar. She ate its brains where the oar had broken its skull, ripped it open with her bare hands and used her teeth on the soft belly, biting off chunks, wolfing it down. It was far more palatable than the shark had been, and when she finished, she was refreshed. It was all she would have that day, and by next day she was hungry again, but no prize fish presented itself. She did manage to nab a few floating chunks of ice and suck on those for water.
She sailed hungry through a day and night. She wasn’t sleeping. It was too dark down there in her dreams, so she tried to stay awake. Inside her thoughts the creature continued to come to her. It didn’t speak to her, but it communicated with her nonetheless. It was a terrible communication that made her dreams scream and her skin crawl.
Her hunger helped keep her awake.
Another fish might present itself, and that was something to think about instead of the monster that stretched for as far as she could see. Earlier in the day she had seen a seal, or something quite like one, swimming near the boat, not too far underwater, quite visible when the sun hit the waves just right. She hoped she might come across another, one more foolish, willing to rise up and present its head to be banged with an oar.
By midday the boat had actually caught an underwater current of some sort, and it drifted out and away from the shoreline. But then an odd thing happened. It was discernable, but only a little, and near impossible to assimilate mentally. The mountain had reached beyond the shoreline. It was about to enter the water. And that’s what happened. The entire icy shoreline cracked with an ear-piercing sound, and the great mountain dropped straight into the water, part of it disappearing like the fabled continent of Atlantis. Monstrous tentacles writhed from it.
It was so insane Amelia began to gulp air, like a fish that had been docked.
As the mountain slipped into the water, the sea rose up and the boat rose with it. The weight of the mountainous monster, a small continent of sorts, swelled the sea level. The impossible creature kept drifting down into the waters, and then abruptly it ceased to drift. It had hit bottom, but still the peaks of it rose out of the sea and the tentacles, as big as redwood trees, thrashed at the air and smacked the water like an angry child. The broken ice popped up before it and along its impossible length in iceberg chunks, bobbing like ice cubes in a glass.
The boat was borne toward the shoreline, which was entirely taken up by the behemoth. And then, all along the visible part of the beast, there was a horizontal fissure. The fissure spread wide with a cracking sound so loud Amelia covered her ears. The fissure spread for miles. There were jagged rows of teeth inside it, each the size of mountaintops, and there was spittle on the teeth, running in great wet beads, as if it was tumbling snow from an avalanche, and rising out of the great mouth was a sudsy foam, like white lava from a volcano. The teeth snapped together with an explosion so loud it deafened Amelia. When the impossible mouth opened again, it became wider yet; the bottom of it touched the sea. The water flowed into it with the briskness of a tsunami, and in the drag of it, the lifeboat jetted toward the mouth.
Amelia grabbed the oars and tried to use them, but it was useless. The rush of the water toward the open mouth of the creature was too strong and too swift; it could not be denied.
She saw the great fissure of a mouth tremble, and then the boat came closer, flowing now with even greater speed.
“Why?” she yelled to the wind and water. “I am nothing. I’m not even an appetizer.”
Amelia began to laugh, loud and hysterical. She could hear herself, and it frightened her to hear it, but she couldn’t stop.
And then the little fly-speck of a boat, with its smaller laughing speck inside, entered into the trembling, foam-flecked mouth that was a length beyond full view of the eye, and tumbled as if over a vast waterfall. The boat banged against one of the jagged teeth like a gnat hitting a skyscraper, came apart, and it and Amelia, who gave one last great laugh, were churned beneath the water and carried into the monster’s gullet, along with creatures of the sea.
Elder Things
Before there was any life on the b
arren rocks of this terrestrial globe, but only living things in the oceans, a race of intelligent beings descended from the heavens. They came flying down on their wings through the cosmic jelly that fills the spaces between the stars after a journey that had spanned half the cosmos and taken aeons to complete.
Theon, the blind Greek sculptor, glimpsed them in a dream and described their form to his disciple, Philip the Wise. He writes that in appearance, they were like short, stout trees that walked on five rustling fronds sprouting from their bases. Five broad ridges ran up and down their trunks like the staves of a barrel. From each ridge extended a branching appendage the creatures used as we use our hands. From between these ridges unfolded five wings shaped like fans, which they used to fly through the air or swim beneath the water with astonishing swiftness. They had flat heads of a kind that resembled a multicolored starfish. On each of the five points was an eye, and between the points were stalks with mouths on their ends. These were also five in number.
These beings, who are sometimes called the Elder Things because they were the first race from the stars to colonize our world, were at home on the dry land or beneath the waves of the sea, for they could breathe water or air with equal ease, and could move through the water with great swiftness on their beating wings. They chose to live in the oceans because, at that early period in our world’s history, the land was completely lifeless.